


finding a family somewhere in the ruins

by vapiddreamscape



Series: after it ends, they buy a house [1]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Afro-Latina Lovelace, Developing Relationship, Eventual OT6, Explicit Language, F/F, F/M, Falling In Love, Getting to Know Each Other, M/M, Multi, OT5, POV Character of Color, POV Outsider, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Spoilers, Tags May Change, a semi-reformed theater kid an AI with an anxiety disorder and a sad gay with c4, because linear time is a prison, dom is Black and that's that on that, domestic angst, it's all about the healing lads!, non-linear narration, not sure if all the relationships will be romantic but they'll all be important, sometimes a family is a journalist a communications officer a badass alien
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25519927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vapiddreamscape/pseuds/vapiddreamscape
Summary: You go where your family needs you and the Bedstuy studio Dom and Renée have shared since they were newly-weds doesn’t have room for three more bodies and a supercomputer. Because there’s never any question; Doug, Isabel, Hera, and even Daniel have been his family since before he knew their names and now they will be coming home with them.When Renée comes back to earth, she brings more than just new scars. But now, there is time enough to want and to heal, if only they all have the space and the patience to see it through.
Relationships: Dominik Koudelka/Isabel Lovelace/Renée Minkowski/Doug Eiffel/Hera, Dominik Koudelka/Renée Minkowski, Doug Eiffel/Hera
Series: after it ends, they buy a house [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1848817
Comments: 6
Kudos: 36





	finding a family somewhere in the ruins

**Author's Note:**

> > And I am coming home to you  
> With my own blood in my mouth  
> And I coming home to you  
> If it's the last thing that I do  
>  _Sax Roehmer #1, The Mountain Goats_

When Renée gets home, they buy a house. It was the kind of thing that seemed impossible when they were newlyweds trying to make it in New York City on the salary of an investigative journalist and whatever the military felt like throwing their way. But once you add two or so more people, four years (or more) of back pay, a hefty government payout following their whistleblower complaint, and an even heftier settlement from Goddard for “their pain and suffering” after Isabel worked slowly and methodically to bring them to their knees—it’s...doable. In fact, the white picket fence practically builds itself. 

Dom had cut his teeth in Philadelphia before it was gentrified to hell and back, and in what would become the pattern of his life, got his degree in New York before the hipsters took Brooklyn. His family had been city people for as long as they’d been allowed; his great-grandmother made a beeline straight to Chicago and the Koudelka family had been creeping closer toward the Eastern seaboard with every subsequent generation. 

In short, Dom never thought he’d take a suburban exile lying down. A few of his college friends had traced the path trod by white flight all those decades ago and Renée understood his reluctance for their children (if they ever slowed down enough to have them) to grow up like that. He’d heard too many stories of not-so-benevolent white saviors and less than benevolent racists cropped up more often than he'd think. Not that the city was any safer, but it’d been hard enough to grow up in a school that was majority Black, with a community to hold him up, shove him forward, and later launch him into a new orbit by virtue of their sheer belief in the man Dominick Koudelka could become.

In college, he’d gone out to the payphone, dialed up his mom and begged her to let him come home. He’d had a whole plan: he’d transfer to Temple (if Penn rejected him the first time, he was sure they’d laugh in his face the second) and maybe he’d take a few classes at community college and get back his old job at the corner store while he waited to hear back. Anything to be back with the streets he knew. And she’d just scoffed at him. “Throw away all the money that fancy school gave you? No, sir. You’re going to stay there and you’re gonna graduate. You go where your family needs you and right now, I need you to become the best man possible and take advantage of all the opportunity you’ve been given.” 

He’d stayed at NYU, graduated summa cum laude, while his mom smiled at him from somewhere in the back.

You go where your family needs you and their Bedstuy studio doesn’t have room for three more bodies and a supercomputer. Because there’s never any question; Doug, Isabel, Hera, and even Daniel have been his family since before he knew their names and now they will be coming home with them.

Renée didn’t even need to tell him. After weeks of rumor, blurry photos of the “lost Hephaestus crew” circulating alongside conspiracies, and a particularly heated exchange with one of his Pentagon contacts, he’ finally brought to some government facility near Cape Canaveral. He’d expected...more somehow. He’d often felt like he was the only one grieving the Hephaestus, beyond the pale imitation of loss that comes from a “national tragedy.” This empty conference room is a sinking indication that he might have been right.

Then he sees her, them, ushered through the door by a stern-looking woman in scrubs and he’s too breathless to keep up with that line of thought. He’d thought the first thing he’d think upon seeing her was “Thank God she’s alive.” But in the end (or perhaps, the beginning) it’s “Dear God, she wasn’t alone.”

Of course, he’d known there had been other crew members, having read some excellent reporting by his colleagues and sitting through several hellish hours of debriefing by Pentagon officials he wasn’t personally acquainted with. It’s different though, when the existence of them is made plain and impossible to gloss over. Dom’s not sure if the heat that runs through his chest is comfort or a growing sense of terror. After all, the officials hadn’t spared him too many of the details of his wife’s experience and it haunts them; there’s a gauntness about the group that not even several weeks of the best recuperation the US government can buy could shake. 

They lean against each other clumsily, like a bundle of sticks arranged by a Boy Scout troop before they start their first fire. She stands at the front of the clump of them, the sturdy trunk against which they all rest their weight despite being at least half a head shorter than the rest.

“I thought space was supposed to make you taller, babe.”

Dom wants to kick himself. He thinks his wife is dead for years and that’s the first thing he decides to say to her. He’s a fucking writer--he literally gets paid to be better with words than this. Luckily, he’s saved from his humiliation when the shorter of the two men erupts into laughter. “He’s funny.” The tall, gangly one elbows—Doug Eiffel, if he remembers his briefing correctly—elbows him the ribs, “Stop ruining the moment, Daniel,” he hisses.

“What? Minkowski never told us he was funny! That seems like the kind of thing we should know about.” Daniel turns to Renée and says accusatorily, “You don’t seem the type to be into funny guys.”

The other woman, whose hair curls just like his sister’s and whose voice carries the faintest tinge of Brooklyn, seizes them both by the collar of their shirts. “We really can’t bring you idiots anywhere,” she mutters through gritted teeth. “Come on Tweedledum and Tweedumber, let’s give the lovebirds their space.” She begins ushering them out of the room.

“No!” Renée exclaims, half-turning away from him as if she’s going to drag the ragtag trio bodily back into the room. “I mean,” she deflates with a soft sigh and turns back to Dom, “I’d prefer they stay if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all, as long as your friends don’t mind if I start this over real quick.” He smiles softer, holding out his hands to close the space between the group piled into the doorway and his own place leaning against the conference table.

Dom has not allowed himself to imagine this moment, not when he first watched his wife take to the stars, especially not when his editor at the _Times_ came running into his office, breathless with the news that Goddard had lied to his fucking face. But his subconscious has always been kind of a son-of-a-bitch, so Dom has found himself the unwitting dreamer of this reunion more times than he would like to count. (No matter how hard his therapist tried, he never could quite get a handle on lucid dreaming. He could see her, touch her, live for this moment with her—why would he want to wake up?)

In that way, it’s like his dreams. Renée takes his hands, closes the distance between them, and stares up at him for a long moment. She reaches up and, with a shaking hand, brushes the tips of her fingers against his [stubbly] cheek, her caress so soft that he aches against the ghost of her touch. “You’re real. I-I…” she shakes her head. “I love you.”

She guides his head down until they’re nose to nose. “God, Renée,” he murmurs against her lips. “I missed you so much.”

Their kiss tastes of pills and salt and the heat of a now-distant star and when he pulls away, he wipes the tears from her cheeks with a swipe of his thumb, ignoring his own wet cheeks. “Dammit I thought I could keep myself together, but I didn’t think I’d ever be able to see you again. I didn’t even think about kissing, especially because…I’ve been dead for a while, technically.” Her voice is steady, but a fresh swell of tears wets her cheeks.

There’s no accusation in her voice because this is Renée—Dom fell in love with her in part for her pragmatism and four years in space hasn’t robbed her of that. But it still stings. Dom let Goddard trick him, let himself believe she was gone when he should have known she was out there somewhere trying to get home because his wife was not someone to let something like an evil mega-corporation or the other sundry dangers of the universe stop her. He should have known. He never should have doubted.

Dom pulls her close and Renée buries her face in his chest, squeezing him tight enough to leave him short of breath. One of his hands wraps tight around her waist to keep her tethered; by instinct, the other comes to the back of her head, fingers carding slowly through her hair, longer than he remembers her wearing it before. “I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry,” he whispers, before pressing another kiss to the crown of her head.

Looking up, Dom locks eyes with the woman he’s determined to be Isabel Lovelace, who is quietly ushering the other two men from the room. He shakes his head and inclines his chin ever so slightly in welcome. She scoffs but he notices a slight softening behind her eyes, a twitch at the corner of her mouth, a relaxing of her shoulders. He grins in victory as she releases Doug and Daniel from her iron grip. Doug all but runs over, nearly tripping over his feet on the way over before enveloping Renée from the other side.

Daniel and Isabel approach more hesitantly. “You know I’m not really a hug kind of guy, so maybe I’ll just sit this one out.”

Doug turns his head just enough to give Daniel the most kicked-puppy expression Dom has seen in his life. Isabel sighs and shoves him forward, “Shut up and hug the man before he bursts into tears, Jacobi.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Daniel chirps, snapping off a practiced salute before squeezing tight against the rest of them. Dom can feel Renée chuckle against his collarbone.

He notices Isabel hanging back, watching as they all bask in each other, in their mutual survival for this moment and Dom isn’t quite sure why but he knows that simply won’t do. He frees the hand tangled in Renée’s hair and, extracting it from the knot of wayward astronauts, extends it in her direction. She blinks at it for a moment, two, before turning her gaze back to his face. She looks like a swallow who has alit on a tree branch, seconds from spooking—in other words, almost exactly like he remembers Renée the first few times they met. Just as he did a decade and change ago, he just smiles and nods, an invitation without expectation. 

Isabel folds into the embrace as easily as the others. She envelops them all in her arms, even Dom and she squeezes almost tightly as Renée does. And for the first time since meeting her, Dom gets to see the gift that is her smile brighten the room.

Dom wants to apologize again, for the possibilities he refused to believe, for the horrors they endured as he sat blind and grieving. Dom wants to thank them, for being here, for being there, for bringing her (and themselves) home. Dom wants to know what they’ve been through, what events could to make this moment feel like one lived a thousand times before, even to him. 

Dom wants. But now, there is time enough to want all that and then some, if only he has the space, and the patience, to see it through.

**Author's Note:**

> coming back from a three-year fic hiatus with a multi-chapter rarepic fic? more likely than you think! i blame the wolf 359 discord server in general, and [Julia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jlennyb/pseuds/jlennyb), in particular.
> 
> i've been working on this fic for ages and i have essentially all of it outlined. my goal is to have it finished before i head back to school in a little over a month so expect semi-frequent updates, especially if the server keeps bullying me. until then, there is [a playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/00CY51PMoyEsMTX4WVCrNS?si=6Vjy4b_XRzSHRIvWWyREGg), of course, which is where i express all my post-canon feels via sad boy indie music.
> 
> find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/vapiddreamscape), [tumblr](https://vapiddreamscape.tumblr.com), or wherever you listen to podcasts.


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